This invention relates to weather radar, spurious aircraft detections, and specifically for removal of spurious aircraft detections from a weather radar display when displaying of such detections is not desired.
Weather radars are known in the art for detecting and displaying severe weather to a crew in an aircraft on a two-dimensional map display showing range, bearing, and intensity of a detected weather system, which may be convective or stratiform in nature. Flight hazards due to weather conditions are primarily the result of precipitation and turbulence. Airborne weather radars have been optimized to detect rain.
As weather radars become more sensitive and hold and process previously sampled state information, other aircraft are being detected and displayed to flight crews when not desired. Newer radars use longer transmitter pulse widths that make the problem worse since the length of the radar return from aircraft on the radar display is not substantially different from the radar return length as produced by a small area weather feature.
A spurious aircraft may appear as multiple images on a weather radar system display due to storage of the target echo in internal memory and the motion of the spurious aircraft. Having a weather display with spurious aircraft displayed is undesirable since it may lead to difficult decision making about the weather and the spurious aircraft motion.
What is needed is a reliable low-cost system for detection and removal of spurious aircraft from a weather radar display.